12 TESTING
tested this product on an animal and we got this result,” but there is no factor or ratio that can then tell you how a test on animal cells will relate to humans. You can place a known irritant into a rabbit’s eye to time the redness and tearing effect and compare it with your own. The known irritant might take 5 minutes and ours might take half an hour, but you don’t really know whether it is safe or not.
What may have happened would have been a number of other products may have been tested in the past and the data for them all said half an hour and they all sold without any issues then you get a level of comfort but you get nothing like the level of data as you do with the new tests. And the fact remains that animal cells are different.
One of the big challenges the industry is having with validating alternatives to animal testing is invariably what the regulators do is say “Well if you come up with a new test on, [for example], skin cells, we will need to validate it against the data we’ve already got”. And what you’re doing here is validating data against non-robust data.
I think you adopt the technology that exists at the time and it almost becomes a hygiene level. People assume that everyone is doing it, so they should do it. But times have changed now and the technology around to be able to harvest and grow skin cells, keep them alive and see how they react to chemicals, and to be able to quantitatively assess that, it gives us an amazing level of data. And there is a robustness to the validation work when developing test methods as well. You are asking a number of laboratories around the world to conduct the same test, with the same materials all issued by the same company, and it is a cross-validation. So I know that to a certain extent I could come to XCellR8 and then go to another laboratory that was using the same methods and the same protocols, the result would be the same. PC: What other formulation challenges do you face getting new products to market currently? JM: As with many things it’s differentiating yourself in the marketplace. We have a finite number of raw materials that we can use, and depending on where you are selling your cosmetics as well – that puts some restrictions on the types of ingredients you can use.
As The Body Shop, we have products in 69 countries around the world and what we do is actively force ourselves to use the most stringent regulations in any of those markets. So, we take the European regulations, the US regulations, the Japanese regulations, the Korean regulations and we throw them into a big
PERSONAL CARE EUROPE
bucket and if any of those regulatory bodies have rules and restrictions, we apply that to every single product, whether it’s being launched in that market or not. The view is that there is scientific evidence there that has made someone look up and make a decision.
The other challenge is that as a business
there are certain ingredients we won’t use because of our position on animal testing. We have a very strict position on the fact we don’t want to use commercial materials that have been tested on animals, so we’re actively putting ourselves at a disadvantage. However that’s the price we pay for having a very strong position since the 1980s on animal testing, and will continue to have through pushing for the UN to have the ban, and also through not going into China unless it is clear that our cruelty-free status could be maintained. And to be fair to China they are working fairly hard on it at the moment and we’ve seen some changes in the regulations in the last couple of years. PC:We hear much about how consumers are becoming more ‘ingredient conscious’. As The Body Shop has always marketed to ingredient savvy consumers, do you feel you have held an advantage here, or have you also noticed a change? JM: I think at The Body Shop, we’ve always attracted ingredient conscious consumers.
This is why we launched our Forever Against Animal Testing campaign to demonstrate the appetite for cruelty free cosmetics.
This move towards vegetarianism and veganism more recently in the marketplace is a part of people being more conscious of what they are consuming, certainly from the food perspective, but now we are seeing it more in cosmetics. We are getting more demand for vegan products – for us it’s a hygiene level that you should be a vegetarian brand, and that goes through not just our products but also our accessories. So where we’re making makeup brushes we’re making sure we’re using artificial hairs. PC: And what is The Body Shop’s position on lanolin? JM: It is something we have used in the past but we don’t use it anymore. The problem with lanolin is that in order to keep sheep in good condition, farmers will put them through sheep dip, obviously to make sure there are no parasites, etc. And that sheep dip is ultimately a pesticidal solution. When you shear in order to extract the
lanolin from the wool you end up pulling some of those pesticides through. Lanolin is quite widely used, in the pharmaceutical industry especially, and we have used it in the past because it does have some unique properties but we’ve found enough
November 2018
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